Siegfried Sassoon online: An indictment and a reconciliation
(Siegfried Loraine Sassoon; 8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967)
Ah, this is good:
“The first ever online collection of the manuscripts, photos and letters of Siegfried Sassoon, launched this Armistice day, focuses on his war poetry.”
Not just good because Sassoon is now perhaps most famous for his ‘declaration against the war’, which he wrote in April 1917 in England, during his recovery from a sniper wound:
“I believe that this war, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them.”
Written a few wars back but how many of our soldiers and their families would not be willing to co-sign this declaration, with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in mind?
Still, more meaningful – and hopefully enduring – perhaps is what Sassoon wrote after the war, in November, 1918.
He who had fought three years in the trenches, who had witnessed and described and survived the foulest horrors, could also write this poem, the same month that the last shot of the war had been fired:
Reconciliation
When you are standing at your hero’s grave,
Or near some homeless village where he died,
Remember, through your heart’s rekindling pride,
The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.
Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;
And you have nourished hatred harsh and blind.
But in that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son.
So, perhaps there still is some hope for our species left. Here’s the link to that online collection.
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